Michael Oher is a fine football player, who is an employee of the National Football League (NFL) and the benefactor of white people and their amazing altruism. We have previously written about Oher and the white family that nurtured him to a scholarship at Ole Miss, for nature dealt Mr. Oher a cruel blow as he never knew his father and was one of 13 siblings living in a poor district of Memphis:
“Among 13 siblings from the poorest part of Memphis, he never knew his father, whose murder he learned of months after the fact in high school. His mother, Denise Oher, was addicted to crack cocaine. The kids were scattered about.
Michael attended 11 schools in nine years. If not in a foster home, he lived with friends. He was homeless.
The Tuohys took in Oher, allowing him a safety net in their home in upscale East Memphis two blocks from the school. For months he came and went as he pleased, and Leigh Anne worried when he didn't spend the night. They hired a tutor to address severe academic deficiencies, paid his tuition and gave him a wardrobe and other essentials. Sean says the generosity was not the result of any epiphany or even as much as a family meeting.
"We think God sent him to us," Sean says. "Earthly explanations don't make sense."
Let’s be honest. Earthly explanations don’t make sense in this situation, for Memphis harbors one of the nation’s highest crime rates, thereby making the decision by the Tuohys one that was fraught with danger :
“On September 27, 2007, a headline in The Commercial Appeal, the city’s biggest newspaper, announced a dubious honor: “Memphis Leads U.S. in Violent Crime.” Local precincts had been seeing their internal numbers for homicide, rape, aggravated assault, and robbery tick up since the late 1990s, starting around the time Barnes saw the first dead car. By 2005, a criminologist closely tracking those numbers was describing the pattern as a crime explosion.”
Perhaps this can be explained using the psychological theory of Stockholm syndrome, for although no-one has been kidnapped in this situation, the white family in question seems to exhibit signs that permeate the entire white population of the United States: a callous indifference to Hate Facts and a near defiance of their existence.
It might be fate that we near National Adoption Day (November 21) at a time when the movie canonizing the actions of the Tuohys’ family and the Oher merger is coming out. Also, it could be fate that SBPDL has decided to look into adoption at roughly the exact same time frame.
Now, were the white world full of Angelina Jolie’s, Madonna’s and Tuohys’, then the incredible population boom among the colored people of the world could easily be met with a warm embrace of TLC as ostensibly, only white people can provide.
Sadly, not everyone is as enthusiastic about white people adopting Black people and encouraging them to enter a world where Acting White is permissible and encouraged, while being the Token Black is a sign of prestige:
“Since 1972, the influential National Association of Black Social Workers (NABSW) has taken this stance, suggesting that interracial adoption is a form of "genocide" and that "black children in white homes are cut off from the healthy development of themselves as black people."
"Same race makes sense because it is what the child is accustomed to, what causes the least disruption in the child's life," says Toni Oliver, a chairman of the organization. "Oftentimes when people are looking at 'love is all it takes,' they seem to overlook the impact race has on our society. Somehow when it's a case of adoption, race suddenly doesn't seem to matter anymore."
The North American Council on Adoptable Children also has serious reservations. "It is probably optimal if children are placed in same-race, same-culture placements, but we do not condone delaying placement and preventing children from finding homes just to meet that optimal placement," says spokeswoman Diane Riggs.”
Now remember that more than 70 percent of Black children our born out of wedlock, thereby creating a much larger pool of potential children who could one day be up for adoption:
“Other data released last month showed the percentage of unwed mothers differs from race to race. While 28 percent of white women gave birth out of wedlock in 2007, nearly 72 percent of black women and more than 51 percent of Latinas did.
"With the publicity of our first family," meaning the Obamas, Henry said in a discussion group entry, marriage might "slowly become more of a norm for all."
Let’s take a quick look at adoption statistics by race:
“Opponents of race matching contend that the numbers now seem stacked against the possibility of same-race adoptions. Of the estimated 500,000 children in the U.S. foster home system, more than half are minorities. Of those available for adoption, 40 percent are black, although blacks represent only about 13 percent of the general population. What is more, according to the National Adoption Center, which keeps track of so-called hard-to-place children, about 67 percent of such children are black and 26 percent are white, while 67 percent of the waiting families are white and 31 percent are black.”
Yikes. That translates to being a high percentage of Black children that run the risk of never finding a family as generous as the Tuohys. Worse:
The most recent estimate of transracial adoption was performed in 1987 by the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS). The findings revealed that only 1% of white women adopt black children.
5% of white women adopt children of other races
2% of women of other races adopt white children (estimates include foreign-born).
More incredibly, it appears the high numbers of Black people eligible for adoption in the United States are disregard for Asian babies in need of adoption by white couples:
“Although available statistics are rough estimates, several sources show that the percentage of transracial or transcultural adoptions in the United States is significant. For example, one source estimates that 1,000 to 2,000 African-American children are adopted by Caucasian families each year.
Data from the Immigration and Naturalization Service show that U.S. families adopted 7,088 children from other countries in 1990. This means that there were roughly 8,500 transracial or transcultural adoptions in 1990. In that same year, there were almost 119,000 adoptions of all kinds.
Since approximately half of the adoptions in any year are stepparent or relative adoptions, in 1990 there were about 59,500 nonrelative adoptions. The percentage of transracial/transcultural adoptions (8,500 of 59,500) then, comes out to more than 14 percent.”
Worse, Black children stay in Foster care homes at a rate that far exceeds the time white kids stay in homes:
“The study, which was endorsed by seven national child welfare groups, analyzed the 1994 federal law, and found it has not led to equity in adoption rates for children. Black children still stay in foster care an average of nine months longer than white children, it stated.
Multiple forces may be at work. Black children are over-represented in the child welfare system. In Florida, a 2007 federal government oversight study found black children are over-represented at a rate of almost twice their proportions in the population. In explanation, it pointed to higher rates of poverty, hurdles in tapping support services and racial bias and difficulties in finding permanent homes.”
Moving forward in the discussion is a statistic that SBPDL finds troubling, considering the massive implications the stubbornness it exhibits:
“The National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG) is the only national source of data on voluntary relinquishment for adoption. According to the 1995 NSFG, 1 less than 1 percent of children born to never-married women were placed for adoption from 1989 to 1995 (Chandra, Abma, Maza, & Bachrach, 1999).
- The percentage is higher for White never-married women (1.7 percent) than for Black never-married women (near 0 percent).
- Relinquishment by married and formerly married women is rarer still, and percentages are not available.
About 1.4 million children were born to unmarried women in 2003, comprising 34.6 percent of total births (Hamilton, Martin, & Sutton, 2004). If the relinquishment rate measured by NSFG in 1995 for never-married women were applied to all unmarried women who gave birth in 2003, this would mean that fewer than 14,000 children were voluntarily relinquished in 2003.”
Black women must be commended for their desire to keep their child – instead of voluntarily relinquishing their child for adoption – for more than 70 percent of Black children our born out of wedlock, which means roughly that same percentage is raised by a single parent. Where is Tyler Perry’s Madea when you need her?
SBPDL would like to point out the relative few Black people who adopted white people, yet despite the dearth in numbers we find this practice admirable. We live in a Black world and it is important to subject white babies – since Newsweek deemed them all evil racists anyways – to the future at an early age.
It is our hope all white babies will be removed from their families henceforth and introduced to Black families – of which only 27 percent operate in a nuclear family setting – so that they can better prepare for life in the Black world now.
Of course, the problem of not wanting the child does occasionally pop up from time to time, as white parents do have buyers remorse:
“The "Today" show on NBC did a shocking segment on Anita Tedaldi, "a woman who adopted a child and then gave him up 18 months later." Tedaldi is a writer who originally told this story on The New York Times' Motherlode blog.
She and her husband have five biological children and decided that they wanted more. After going through the approval process, she was able to adopt a baby who was found by the side of a road. Despite her pre-adoption belief that she would "be able to parent this little boy the same way I had done with my biological daughters," she terminated the adoption after 18 months.
Because she couldn't bond with him, she said.”
A Black writer from the Washington Post posed the question that SBPDL asks now, “why do white people love to adopt non-white(but non-Black) babies”:
“All the same, I can't understand why so many white American couples go overseas to adopt, ignoring the plight of black children in the United States, such as the hundreds in the District of Columbia, Maryland and Virginia awaiting adoption.
One person at a state agency I talked to said one word -- "Madonna" -- when I asked why more people don't adopt black children in the United States.
The well-publicized examples of Madonna and Angelina Jolie to the contrary, however, fewer children are adopted from African countries than, say, from China or Russia. Of the 27,000 children Americans adopted from overseas in fiscal 2005, only 441 came from Ethiopia, the African country with the largest number of international adoptions. Nearly 8,000 came from Russia and more than 4,500 from China, according to the National Council for Adoption.”
The answer is obvious: Disingenuous white liberals love to adopt non-white babies, as long as the baby isn’t Black. They get a chance to show that they are working to eradicate the vicious strain of racism (i.e. white babies) from the universe with the addition of non-white babies to their herd. Again, Newsweek comes to rescue with a great piece on interracial adoption:
“Riding's challenge hints at a persistent social problem. "No country in the world has made more progress toward combating overt racism than [the United States]," says David Schneider, a Rice University psychologist and the author of "The Psychology of Stereotyping." "But the most popular stereotype of black people is still that they're violent. And for a lot of people, not even racist people, the sight of a white child with a black parent just sets off alarm signals."
Part of the reason for the adoptive imbalance comes down to numbers, and the fact that people tend to want children of their own race. African-Americans represent almost one third of the 510,000 children in foster care, so black parents have a relatively high chance of ending up with a same-race child. (Not so for would-be adoptive white parents who prefer the rarest thing of all in the foster-care system: a healthy white baby.) But the dearth of black families with nonblack children also has painful historical roots. Economic hardship and centuries of poisonous belief in the so-called civilizing effects of white culture upon other races have familiarized Americans with the concept of white stewardship of other ethnicities, rather than the reverse.”
Stuff Black People Don’t Like is shocked that the White Man’s Burden continues to be attacked, when, were it not for these benevolent people, Michael Oher would be on the street or worse, in jail:
“More than three times as many black people live in prison cells as in college dorms, the government said in a report to be released Thursday.
Blacks made up 41 percent of the nation’s 2 million prison and jail inmates in 2006. Non-Hispanic whites made up 37 percent and Hispanics made up 19 percent.”
Newsweek is wrong, for white stewardship – as the case of Michael Oher shows – is vital at this delicate juncture in American history for the future of Black people to be secured. It’s like the plot of the Terminator in reverse: Black women should give up their children – remember more than 70 percent our born out of wedlock – to white families so that the future for Black people can secure.
We can call it the Michael Oher Act: removing Black children from at-risk families (since more than 70 percent of Black kids live in a single-home and are at risk) to white families for guidance.
Stuff Black People Don’t Like includes the reality of adoption, for without the magnanimous nature of white stewardship, the Black incarceration rate would be higher and we would be deprived of the Michael Oher story, which coincidentally is something Black people like even less, because it proves it doesn’t take a village to raise a child… just a loving white family is the only ingredient necessary.
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